Closing the Data Gap: Inside Baseline’s Scalable Computer-Vision Partnership with the ATP

iSportConnect’s Taruka spoke with Michael who is a sports technology entrepreneur and co-founder of Baseline, a portable computer-vision and AI-powered player and ball-tracking platform for racket and net sports. Engineered by a founding team with deep engineering and scientific backgrounds, Baseline bridges the technological divide in sports analytics by delivering high-precision 3D trajectory tracking, real-time match statistics, and line-calling insights without the heavy hardware footprint or prohibitive costs of traditional multi-camera systems. Through a strategic partnership with Tennis Data Innovations (TDI) and the ATP Challenger Tour, Baseline’s rapidly deployable camera setup operates across hundreds of professional, collegiate, and semi-professional events globally.

Tech in sports often exists purely behind the scenes. How would you explain Baseline to someone who is new to sports technology?

Technology is ultimately just a vehicle to serve a purpose. At the end of the day, our goal is to provide tools that help people train better, compete better, and have more fun playing sports. Whether an athlete is playing recreationally or professionally, everyone wants a blend of improvement, fair play, and engagement. What we aim to deliver is a solution that offers top-tier tracking tools to the broadest possible audience using smart, accessible technology.

What inspired you and your founding team to build Baseline? Did it stem from your personal background in tennis?

I am a huge tennis enthusiast and decent player myself, though never at a professional level. As someone with an engineering and science background, I noticed a massive structural gap in the market. On one end, you had basic consumer tools that relied on tripods, static video recording, and cumbersome setups that provided very limited analytical feedback. On the other end, you had ultra-expensive, permanent multi-camera systems like Hawk-Eye that required fixed infrastructure, heavy wiring, and central servers, making them viable only for high-budget Grand Slams. There was nothing in between. My co-founder and I realized that using modern computer vision, we could bridge that gap by delivering high-performance, accurate tracking in a portable, highly scalable format.

Baseline recently established a major partnership with Tennis Data Innovations (TDI) and the ATP Challenger Tour. How did this collaboration come together, and what problem does it solve for professional tennis?

This partnership was the culmination of over five to six years of technical development and rigorous validation. The ATP Challenger Tour represents the essential pathway to elite tennis, hosting roughly 350 tournaments worldwide every year. However, because these events move to different clubs and academies every week, installing permanent, multi-camera tracking systems on every court is financially and logistically impossible. TDI needed an accurate, reliable, and scalable system that could be deployed quickly. We spent over a year working with the ATP to prove our system’s accuracy and real-time performance. Today, our technology can be set up on court in under an hour, providing live player and ball-tracking data for two to three Challenger events around the world every single week.

What has been the feedback from tournament organizers, players, and officials using the system on tour?

The best feedback we receive is that the system operates seamlessly without interfering with the match. Players and coaches get access to the exact same granular, real-time statistics—such as serve speeds, rally length, net clearance, and shot placement—that you typically see at Grand Slams, but at lower-tier tour events that previously had no tracking infrastructure. For tournament directors and TDI, the quick setup and ease of deployment make it incredibly simple to deliver pro-grade analytics across global venues.

What specific metrics and technical data points does Baseline generate during a match?

Our system tracks the player, ball, and court boundaries at 60 frames per second in real time. By constructing a full 3D trajectory of the ball after every single shot, we stream live data to ATP servers and broadcast outlets. This allows us to calculate metrics including ball speed, acceleration, net clearance, spin rate, exact landing coordinates, player positioning, first/second serve success rates, return depths, and win percentages based on rally length. Everything is derived directly from that real-time 3D optical tracking model.

High-end tracking systems like Hawk-Eye have traditionally dominated elite tennis. Does Baseline compete directly with those established enterprise systems?

We don’t compete directly with multi-camera systems installed at Grand Slams or Masters 1000 events, which require 10 to 20 fixed cameras, central server rooms, and onsite operational teams. Instead, Baseline captures what we call the “99% of the market” that sits beneath those top-tier venues. We provide an accessible, high-accuracy alternative for the ATP Challenger Tour, national leagues, semi-pro circuits, college tennis programs (like the UTR network), and private academies that could never justify or afford traditional infrastructure. We fill the gap where high-end technology previously could not scale.

While Baseline started in tennis, is the underlying technology applicable to other sports?

We began with tennis because it’s our core passion, but the underlying computer vision model was engineered for all “net sports”. Any sport involving players on opposing sides of a net with a ball or projectile passing between them—such as pickleball, padel, badminton, volleyball, and table tennis—can utilize this technology. Tennis remains our primary focus, but expanding into adjacent net sports represents a natural evolution for our platform.